I use Postgres window functions with Hibernate and Doctrine, plus lots of other Postgres-specific functionality. The real benefit of the ORM to me are that: *

I use Postgres window functions with Hibernate and Doctrine, plus lots of other Postgres-specific functionality. The real benefit of the ORM to me are that: * some query results are cached * the "unit of work" pattern allows me to distribute changes to an entity and then commit it as a transaction. Anyway, the ability to suddenly switch RDBMS only works out in practice if you actively maintain support for multiple engines.